Keep Calm Scrum On

Agile is a path where you learn and improve continuously. With this statement someone asked “If it is a path then how do you know how much to travel and how much to be left to travel”. This brings in a question in our mind how do we measure the agility of our teams ? Is there a standard matrix or assessment tool ? The answer to this is NO, however you can test your teams against the core values of scrum. You can post some very smart questions against each of these values to identify how effective they are as a team.Some of the sample effective questions are as follows:

1. If you are doing iterations, are they four weeks or less? The answer should be yes. Many of us like one or two week iterations. Why? Because you get feedback more often rather than less often.

2. Do you have demos at the end of each and every iteration? The answer should be yes. Why? To get the feedback from the customer/Product Owner.

3. Do you get every item in the backlog to done at the end of every iteration? The answer should be yes. For many teams on their journey, the answer is “not yet.” This does not make you bad, it makes you “on your journey.” You want to discover why.

4. Do you perform retrospectives at the end of each iteration to learn and inspect/adapt to improve your team’s agile process?

Agile Self-assessments help teams to see where they are, and to decide what the next steps will be. Assessing the agile maturity of your teams has been a big pain area for most of the Organisation.